In part, this has to be because of the introduction to my copy, from Clarke himself, written after 2001, the year, had passed, which gave some interesting bits of information. And reading Clarke’s 2001? Well, at the very least, it is the best thing of his I’ve ever read. I’m reading Asimov at the moment and find the great man isn’t quite as great as I used to think.

You get older and some heroes become disappointingly normalised, while many also-rans, start to prove their skill. After many viewings, plus learning a lot about the musical choices of Kubrick (there’s a bloody good reason why Richard Strauss’s opening to Also Sprach Zarathustra was chosen – horrifically and subsequently relegated to a spoiled cliché though it was), I came to have a pretty good understanding of what the hell the movie was all about. I know that’s contentious (the number of people I know personally who say they love and highly rate the film I can count on one hand and have fingers left to spare), but I hold that it is true and, on the whole, both critics and ‘Top Ten’ type lists tend to agree (give or take a superlative or two). That said, the Stanley Kubrick movie of 2001 was, without a shadow of doubt, one of the greatest movies of any genre. Compared with Asimov (and Clarke so often was) and Anne McCaffrey, I really didn’t find Clarke so interesting. Even in my youth, when I devoured classic sci-fi while other kids my age were discovering their dad’s not-so-secret stash of porn magazines, I was reading things like ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, ‘Imperial Earth’ and ‘Childhood’s End’ and really not so impressed, to be honest.

Arthur clarke space odyssey